Roy touts training, counseling as future keys - Air Force News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Air Force Times

Roy touts training, counseling as future keys

ATLANTA — The Air Force’s top enlisted leader wants to add classrooms for professional military education and expand marriage counseling services to help airmen cope with relationship problems so they don’t resort to suicide.

Chief Master Sgt. of the Air Force James Roy told a crowd of 1,400 at the annual conference of the Air Force Sergeants Association that his three areas of focus remain preparing airmen for joint and coalition operations; developing them through a combination of experience, education and training; and making them and their families more resilient against both everyday pressures and those unique to military life.

Roy, who has been chief since June 2009, received a warm reception from the audience of mostly senior noncommissioned officers and retirees who packed the ballroom at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta. Airmen from bases worldwide attended the four-day AFSA conference, which included panel discussions and breakout sessions.

During his hour-long talk Aug. 17, Roy stressed the need to close the gap between the first two levels of professional military education — Airman Leadership School and the Noncommissioned Officer Academy — and proposed adding 16 NCO Academy classrooms to cut the 10-year break between the programs.

“First-line supervisors are one of our most important leadership [positions] we have in the Air Force, and there’s a 10-year gap?” he said. “We need to close that gap.”

Regulation requires technical sergeants to attend NCO Academy within two years of being promoted, but about 16,000 airmen are still waiting to go through the program, Roy said. All technical sergeants must graduate from NCO Academy before they can be promoted to master sergeant.

In a follow-up interview with Air Force Times, Roy said service officials have not yet set a timeline for when the classrooms could be added because the project still has not been funded.

“The future is not tomorrow,” he said. “It’s five, 10 years from now.”

An Air Force that reaches the “sweet spot” of future professional military education would see staff sergeants attend NCO Academy a few years after ALS and shortly after being placed in a supervisory role, he said.

Roy made it clear that professional military and “off-duty” education is just one part of developing airmen. Experience and training, too, play crucial roles. Experience comes from job rotation and special duties, both at home and abroad. Training comes from formal training and learning on the job.

“Experiences are just as important as education,” he said. “The challenges we face today and how we work on them help our development. And when those that are deployed reflect back on what they learned decades later, it will affect their approach to problems. Experiences drive the future.”

Coping tools

Roy believes a program that began on the other side of the Atlantic can help bring down the number of airmen who commit suicide.

As of Aug. 17, 62 airmen had committed suicide, Roy said. The number for the same time period last year stood at 49. Spouses and dependents are also killing themselves, he added, though the service doesn’t track those figures.

“We have to ask ourselves, ‘What is going on?’ ” Roy told the crowd. “We have a solid wingman program. It’s important to watch over each other, but it’s not just one-on-one. It’s watching over everybody.”

Studies show the top contributing factors to suicide are relationship issues and financial difficulties — not deployments, Roy said.

The chaplains at U.S. Air Forces in Europe operate a marriage-enrichment program — a retreat of sorts — that helps spouses cope with the stresses of military life. Roy learned about the program on a recent trip to Ramstein Air Base, Germany, headquarters for USAFE, and told the Air Staff when he returned to the Pentagon that the program needed to be more widely available.

“We were going through a budget drill [recently], and guess what? Now marriage enrichment is going to be funded by the U.S. Air Force — for every command,” he said amid growing applause. “That’s not going to solve all of it. But it’ll help. It’s a start.”

Like marriage problems, financial pressures — from plunging real-estate values to mountains of credit-card bills — are often mentioned in suicide notes left by airmen.

Roy himself hears from airmen who are having money problems. He told the audience of a young staff sergeant who is $38,000 in debt and wondering how he’ll get out. In the interview with Air Force Times, Roy told of a technical sergeant breaking down in tears when she shared her story with him. She had orders to move and has a home in another location; her husband took a job as a contractor overseas because of the hefty paycheck it offered. Even with tax relief, the couple is strapped for money, he said.

The chief urged senior NCOs to talk with younger airmen about maintaining smart financial habits.

“We are in a financial crisis,” he said in his speech. “Even though we’re in a stable income, many of us are upside-down on our houses. Many of us have lost a lot of money from our houses and other things. From a leadership perspective, every one of your senior NCOs need to take this on. It’s something we can help with.”

This and that

Roy touched on several other issues, both in a question-and-answer session after his speech and in his interview with Air Force Times:

Unit deployment managers: The days of airmen serving as unit deployment managers besides doing their regular jobs could be coming to an end.

A UDM schedules deployment training for airmen and tracks what personnel, equipment and cargo are ready for deployment, which requires recording specifics on each, such as who has the proper immunizations or the dimensions and weight of cargo, in databases.

The Air Force can train only about 125 UDMs a year, but the demand remains high, Roy said.

“We’re looking at it not being an additional duty but making it more of a permanent position,” he said. “And, quite frankly, what kind of training do we offer? Not much.”

Gays in the military: The Pentagon sent out 400,000 surveys to service members regarding the repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which prohibits gays and lesbians from serving openly, and soon will send questionnaires to retirees and family members to measure their sentiments. Air Force had the most returns, according to Roy. The Defense Department has received 110,000 of the surveys back but is not releasing a breakdown of the responses by service, said spokeswoman Cynthia Smith.

An airman asked Roy for his opinion. Roy didn’t state his personal position on the 17-year ban but stressed that repeal would raise complex issues that must be thoroughly discussed.

“What if someone gets married in a state that authorizes [gay marriage] and we PCS them to a state where it’s not [legal]? How do we do that?” he said. “I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, but how do we do that?

“What about benefits? What about housing? There are a lot of different items that need to be looked at when you talk about ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ ”

Physical training: Roy has heard complaints about the tougher PT standards — though none of the extreme measures such as liposuction and starvation diets that Air Force Times has reported — but said the changes are for the good of the airmen and the service.

“If we can continue to educate our people about a healthy lifestyle, the likelihood of their getting sick is not as much,” he said. “And it’s a high likelihood they’ll carry that [attitude] into the civilian lifestyle.”

The chief himself arrived at the hotel gym at 4:30 a.m. the day of his speech for cardio and weight training. He takes his test under the new system next month.